NERC Oil & Gas Knowledge Exchange (Directed) Fellowhip

The Fellow will work at the interface of academic research and industry, and be responsible for exploring, mapping and cross-linking relevant environmental data sets from both sectors. A key aspect of the Fellowship will be to chart the possibilities, scope and limitations of a wide portfolio of environmental data resources from industry, academic research and the wider environmental community.
For the last three decades, EU environmental policies have focused on determining adverse and undesirable changes to the natural system as the result of human activities and on initiating management responses to alleviate impacts (Borja et al. 2009). In addition, resource management, environmental assessment and monitoring primarily focus on single industry sectors in many regions (Queffelec et al. 2009; Kenny et al. 2009). However, there has been a shift in the perception of environmental management in the political agenda, with a move towards an integrative and ecosystem-based management system (EBM), a requirement for quantitative cumulative impact assessment and mapping; and integrated monitoring measures. The environmental research undertaken during the Fellowship will focus on pertinent policy, industry and research questions that may include: (a) what monitoring requirements need to be met for decommissioning; (b) how can recovery be assessed; and (c) will ongoing monitoring be required?
A strict legal framework of national, regional and international regulations governs how disused offshore facilities are decommissioned. Presently, and in the coming years and decades, a number of offshore O&G installations will be decommissioned, not only presenting a number of economic issues (Oil & Gas UK forecasts the total cost of decommissioning for existing and sanctioned infrastructure to be £28.7 billion from 2012 onwards); but also a number of significant environmental challenges. The combination of decommissioning issues, new deep-water exploration territories (platforms in deeper water may have probability higher risk of an incident, such as a spill); and the new production techniques, all highlight areas of uncertainty in environmental data management and assessment. Only a coherent environmental data platform will enable assessment and analysis to be conducted efficiently and in the most scientifically rigorous manner.
Thus, one of the key activities of this Fellowship includes the development of a web-based mapping portal that incorporates current NERC, industry and other sources of environmental data. This portal will make a transformative difference in data accessibility. The Fellowship will also contribute towards a culture of change with regard to data collation and management. Through close industry liaison and KE, the Fellow will work towards securing industry buy-in to this concept of contributing data directly into the portal at source (e.g. uploaded directly as part of the reporting process). Therefore we anticipate that this KE project will also influence future environmental policy and legislation and facilitate addressing uncertainties surrounding the assessment of licensed activity impacts from exploration through to decommissioning on the environment.
Traditionally, marine monitoring around the UK has been limited in scope, in part due to lack of guidance on what, when and how things should be monitored. This is in contrast to, for example, the Norwegian O&G industry which has carried out systematic monitoring of the offshore environment since the ninties (CPA, 2011; OSPAR, 2007) Understanding how Norwegian authorities use their environmental data and lessons learned from the process will be important in determining how best to create the KE platform. Discussions are currently underway to establish Norwegian partnerships, building upon the HWU research team's existing collaborations with the Institute for Marine Research who lead the Norwegian shelf habitat mapping MAREANO programme.